Research Interests

I’m interested in moral decision-making, cognitive linguistics, and understanding whether and how consumers conceptualize animal agriculture as a morally relevant practice. Some specific research interests include…

Moral psychology and consumer behavior

• How does the knowledge that a product or industry causes suffering come to bear on consumer decision-making? To what extent is perceived suffering essential to moralization in the context of consumer behavior?

• How do consumers weight markers of authority, credibility, and expertise against perceived bias?

• To what extent do we perceive entire industries as moral agents, and how does this inform our attributions of blame and responsibility for immoral industry practices?

Linguistics/cognitive science

• How do cognitive frames (e.g., parent/child) structure our perceptions of human/nonhuman animal interactions and animal agriculture?

• How do farmers of nonhuman animals discursively instantiate their moral and social values as well as their identities as industry insiders?

• Are animal rights activists effectively framing their messaging to appeal to a wide range of moral values?

• I’m also broadly interested in anything involving Critical Discourse Analysis, ecolinguistics, lexical feature analysis, corpus methods, cognitive metaphors, and semiotics.

The French Revolution: Language and morality

• I’m inexplicably a bit of a French Revolution hobbyist. My undergraduate honors thesis analyzed (clumsily) the writings of revolutionary figurehead Camille Desmoulins, looking for violations of selectional restrictions in Noun + Verb and Noun + Adjective combinations that might signal metaphorical processes of dehumanization of enemies and personification of the State.

• I remain interested in any project whatsoever that might blend my interests in moral psychology and cognitive linguistics with French Revolutionary history. :)